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Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

fakespot.com

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Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#141
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the general state of firefox suggests that they are not large enough to do more than one thing.

What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.

every year i try using firefox again, because the dominance of chrome bothers me and i want there to be a good competitor. and every year i inevitably run into some issue that makes me give up and go back to chrome. I think last time it was a themeing issue with ubuntu's default built-in dark theme. a previous year it was a sync issue.

with their continued slide in marketshare to what is essentially an irrelevant portion of the market, i'm guessing this isn't just me.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#142

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

It would be nice if they added the ability to more completely style their scrollbars. They could at least pretend it's 2015 or so.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#143

You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…

Not to mention, improving the browser in the space of adblockers installed by default ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji

Adblockers increase the incentives for AI generated "organic" content since in the absence of the ability to push explicitly-marked ads, you're gonna get astroturfing and such instead.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#144
post #46
post #3

I think this is a great acquisition, but I'm curious where this may give Mozilla an advantage. Do they plan on baking this into Firefox, and if so, to what degree are we willing to let the browser govern the content?

How can this strike you as a great acquisition if you aren't sure what the advantage is?

FakeSpot will benefit from a parent company like Mozilla.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bias disclaimer: I've worked on Chrome and Edge, opinions strictly my own >and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome. Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?" is uncalled for, however. There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant performance boosts (around the time Chrome sta…

That's how it felt to me too. Stretched too thin. Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google, I can imagine how hard it is to try to thrive or just survive and maintaining a stable path when you're fighting big pockets. I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more. ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant

>Stretched too thin

Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues and consistently declining number of developers.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#146

You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…

From my perspective Mozilla is doing a better job with their browser than Google and Apple are, that's why I use it (despite the market share, I prefer their implementation of most things compared to alternatives). Everything else is gravy.

I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguably they might even be better off spending it on marketing the browser than any technical metric. I'd rather this kind of thing than marketing.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#147

You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…

From my perspective Mozilla is doing a better job with their browser than Google and Apple are, that's why I use it (despite the market share, I prefer their implementation of most things compared to alternatives). Everything else is gravy. I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguab…

Genuinely asking: Why do you think Firefox is outperforming Chrome / Safari in your opinion?

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember "Firefox OS"?

It was a fantastic gamble IMO. Low chance of success, but enormous payoff if it had succeeded. Imagine a commercially viable alternative to iPhone and Android with multiple manufacturers and a completely open platform. Ultimately, I think they came to market too late and Android moved into the niche (low end market) they were targeting.

Yeah, I'm glad they tried. I absolutely think they should be spending a chunk of their money on things that might broaden their impact and their revenue, even when some of those things don't pan out.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#149
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its great that everything just magically seems to work so well for you, but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so. Same goes for Safari and some of the less popular browsers.

I mean, this is a broad topic and I am more of a backend engineer than frontend these days. However, I did do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6/IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about. but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so This i…

>your chrome-specific shit

okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"?

a lot of that chrome-specific shit is really really nice. like CSS nesting - that would be amazing. firefox has a bug for tracking the implementation, and supported the standardization of it. but there's no sign of any progress towards an implementation. meanwhile safari and chrome have both shipped it.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#150
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective Mozilla is doing a better job with their browser than Google and Apple are, that's why I use it (despite the market share, I prefer their implementation of most things compared to alternatives). Everything else is gravy. I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguab…

Genuinely asking: Why do you think Firefox is outperforming Chrome / Safari in your opinion?

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